Bulwer Lytton’s predilection for the supernatural was neither a theatrical pose nor a passing folly excited by the fashionable craze for psychical research, but a genuine and enduring interest, inherited, it may be, from his ancestor, the learned, eccentric savant, Dr. Bulwer, who studied the Black Art and dabbled in astrology and palmistry.  He was a member of the society of Rosicrucians, and, to quote the words of his grandson, “he certainly did not study magic for the sake of writing about it, still less did he write about it, without having studied it, merely for the sake of making his readers’ flesh creep.”  From his early years Lytton seems to have been keenly interested in supernatural manifestations.  He was inspired by the deserted rooms at the end of a long gallery in Knebworth House to set down the story of the ghost, Jenny Spinner, who was said to haunt them; and the concealed chamber in The Haunted and the Haunters may have been a revived memory of the trap-door down which Lytton as a boy had “peeped with bristling hair into the shadowy abysses of hellhole.”  In Glenallan,[126] an early fragment, we find promising material for a tale of mystery—­a villain with a “strange and sinister expression,” a boy who, like the youthful Shelley, steals forth by night to graveyards, hoping to attain to fearful secrets, and an aged servant, a living chronicle of horrors, who relates the doings of an Irish wizard, Morshed Tyrone, of such awful power that the spirits of the earth, air and ocean ministered to him.  In Godolphin (1833) there is an astrologer with the furrowed brow and awful eye, so common among the people of terror, and a strangely gifted girl, Lucilla, who turns soothsayer.  But when Bulwer Lytton attempts a supernatural romance he leaves far behind him the sphere of Gothic terrors and soars into rarefied, exalted regions that inspire awe rather than horror.  The Dweller of the Threshold in Zanoni is no red-cloaked, demoniacal figure springing from a trap-door with a deafening clap of thunder, but a “Colossal Shadow” brooding over the crater of Vesuvius.

The romance, Zanoni (1842), which Lytton considered the greatest of his works and which Carlyle praised with what now seems extravagant fervour, was based on an earlier sketch, Zicci (1838), and embodies a complicated theory which he had conceived several years earlier after reading some mediaeval treatises on astrology and the occult sciences.  While his mind was occupied with these studies, the character of Mejnour and the main outlines of the story were inspired by a dream, which he related to his son.  According to Lytton’s theory, the air is peopled with Intelligences, of whom some are favourable, others hostile to man.  The earth contains certain plants, which, rightly used, have power to arrest the decay of the human body, and to enable man, by quickening his physical senses and mental gifts, to perceive the aerial beings and to discover the secrets of nature.  This supernatural knowledge is in possession of a brotherhood of whom two only, Mejnour and his pupil Zanoni, are in existence.  The initiation involves the surrender of all violent passions and emotions, and the neophyte must be brought into contact with the powerful and malignant being called the Dweller of the Threshold: